Бернард Корнуэлл - Sharpe's Waterloo

Sharpe found it hard to think. It was as if the battle had deadened his senses. “We’ll go to Paris, I suppose.” He could not imagine the Emperor recovering from this defeat.

“Paris?” Doggett sounded surprised, as though he had not realized till this moment just what Wellington’s army had achieved in this valley that stank of smoke and blood. “You really think we’ll go to Paris?” he asked excitedly.

But Sharpe did not reply. Instead he was watching a horseman pick his way up the face of the ridge and across the long dark scars of earth that had been gouged by the French cannonade. He recognized Captain Christopher Manvell and walked to meet him. “Morning.” Sharpe’s greeting was curt.

Manvell touched a gloved hand to his hat. “Good morning, sir. I was hoping to find you.” He seemed embarrassed and turned to look at Sharpe’s men who, muddied and tired, stared malevolently back at the elegant cavalryman. “He’s dead,” Manvell said without any more effort at politeness.

“Rossendale?”

“Yes. He’s dead.” Manvell’s face showed sadness as he looked back to Sharpe. “I thought you should know, sir.”

“Why would I need to know?” Sharpe asked brutally.

Manvell seemed nonplussed, but then shrugged. “I believe he gave you a note? I’m afraid it’s worthless, sir. He didn’t have a penny of his own money. And then there’s — „Manvell stopped suddenly.

“There’s what?” Sharpe pressured him.

“There’s Mrs Sharpe, sir.” Manvell summoned the courage to say the words. “Someone will have to tell her.”

Sharpe gave a harsh brief laugh. “Not me, Captain. She’s a Goddamned whore, and she can rot in hell for all I care. Good day to you, Captain.”

“Good day, sir.” Manvell watched Sharpe walk away, then turned his horse towards the road where, unknown to Sharpe, Jane waited in her carriage for news. Manvell sighed, and went to break her heart.

Sharpe went back to the dying fire, took the promissory note from his pocket, and tore it into shreds. There would be no easy way of putting a new roof on the chateau after all. He scattered the paper scraps to the breeze, then turned towards his men. “Mr Price!”

“Sir?”

“We’ve got some bandsmen left alive, don’t we?”

“Indeed, sir! We’ve even got a bandmaster!”

“Then get the idle buggers to play us a tune! We’re supposed to be celebrating a bloody victory!”

Somewhere in the valley a woman screamed and screamed, paused to take breath, then screamed again because her husband was dead. Behind the battle line in the farm at Mont-St-Jean the pile of amputated limbs grew higher than the dungheap. A white-faced surgeon came to take the air by the roadside while upstairs, where the wounded officers had been taken to recuperate or die, d’Alembord twitched in his shallow sleep. Mr Little, the rotund bandmaster of the Prince of Wales’s Own Volunteers, launched his few musicians into a ragged version of’Over The Hills and Far Away‘. Sharpe ordered the colours, that had been restored to the battalion, to be unfurled and planted above the deepening grave so that the shadows of the silk flags would caress the dead.

A woman wept at the edge of the grave. She was one of the sixty wives who had been allowed to travel with the battalion and, though she was widowed now, she would probably be married again by the month’s end, for a soldier’s woman never lacked for suitors. Another newly widowed wife, Sally Clayton, sat next to Charlie Weller and Sharpe saw the nervousness with which the young man reached for her hand. “Make me a mug of tea, Charlie,” Sharpe said, “and I’ll make you into a sergeant.”

“Sir?” Charlie stared up in astonishment.

“Do it, Charlie!” Sally was quicker to understand that Sharpe was offering them a sergeant’s wage. “And thank you, Mr Sharpe.”

Sharpe smiled and turned away as a shout told him that Harper had returned from Brussels. The Irishman had brought Sharpe’s dog back with him, and now released Nosey who ran to Sharpe and leaped up to nuzzle and fuss his master. The men of the battalion grinned. Sharpe pushed the dog down, waited for Harper to slide out of the saddle, then walked with his friend towards the lip of the valley.

“She’s well,” Harper confirmed. Lucille had wept when she had learned that Sharpe was safe and unhurt, but she had made Harper promise not to reveal her tears. “And the boy’s well, too.”

“Thank you for going for me.”

Harper grunted. He had left for Brussels before dawn and now stared into the battlefield for the first time on this new day. His face showed no reaction to the horror. Like Sharpe he had seen it a hundred times before. They were soldiers; they were paid to endure horror, which is why they understood horror better than other men. They were soldiers and, like the men who dug the nightsoil from the pits of London, or like the women who tended the pestilent dying in the charity wards, they did a distasteful job that more fastidious men and women despised. They were soldiers, which made them the scum of the earth until a tyrant threatened Britain, and then suddenly they were red-coated heroes and jolly good fellows.

“God save Ireland, but we made a right bloody shit-heap of this place,” Harper commented on the valley.

Sharpe said nothing. He was staring beyond the battlefield to where the sunlight glowed on trees unmarked by fire and where the air smelt summer sweet. The cloudless sky promised a day for haymaking, or a day for lovers to stroll through heavy-leafed woods to rest beside the green cool of a streambank. It was a midsummer’s day on the borders of France, and the world was at peace.

It was indeed a near run thing; „the nearest run thing you ever saw in your life,“ as the Duke of Wellington confessed on the day after the battle, but Napoleon, as the Duke also said, ”just moved forward in the old style, in columns, and was driven off in the old style.“

The Duke himself would probably have been content to let that stand as a full account of the campaign of Waterloo, for he was a man notorious both for the brevity, of his despatches, and for his dislike of authors. He had, he explained later in his life, been too much exposed to authors. One of them, seeking the Duke’s assistance for a projected account of the battle, was sternly advised to leave well alone: ‘you may depend upon it that you will never make it a satisfactory work’. To another such hopeful scribbler he dismissively remarked that a man might as well seek to write the history of a dance as to write the story of a battle.

Many, though, have defied the Duke’s advice, and I must confess my extreme debt to all those whose temerity has produced the vast library on Waterloo. There are too many books to cite here, but I would be shameless if I did not acknowledge two. Even the Duke might have approved of Jac Weller’s Wellington at Waterloo, the final volume of his impressive trilogy on the Duke’s military career. Whenever I found conflict among my sources, and felt unable to clear the matter from my own research, I relied on Jac Weller’s interpretation and I doubt he let me down.

I tremble to imagine what the Duke would have made of a woman writing about his battle, but to my mind the best account of Waterloo is that which concludes Elizabeth Longford’s Wellington, The Years of the Sword. I used Lady Longford as my source for the Duke’s direct quotations, but also for very much more, and I doubt that anyone can ever again write about Wellington or Waterloo without relying on Lady Longford’s marvellous book.

Hundreds of contemporary accounts’exist of the battle, yet still there is controversy. Even at the time of the battle men did not always see what they thought they saw, which is why Britain now has a regiment called the Grenadier Guards. That is the regiment which defeated the larger column of the Imperial Guard, and they were convinced that they had beaten the Grenadiers of the Guard and, to mark their victory, took their enemy’s name. In fact they opposed and beat the Chasseurs of the Guard, but it seems a little late to make the correction now.